Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time, written and read by Clive James (7hrs abridged, Macmillan, £16.99)

The cover picture of Clive James's latest book shows a lightbulb shining over darkness. No sign of a bushel anywhere, but why would there be? Modesty was never his strong suit. Then again, if I'd learned French by reading Proust, could read Russian "fairly fluently" and "get through a simple article in Japanese for my special subject, the war in the Pacific", I probably wouldn't keep mum about it either. Over the past 40 years James has been scribbling notes in the margins of the books he has read about, well, everyone and everything really, and this random collection of essays about Freud, Rilke, Hitler, Diaghilev, Egon Friedell and Charlie Chaplin, to name but a few (and far, far fewer than if it were unabridged), is the result. It's clever, contentious and funny (like its author), the more so with James himself reading it, trying not to laugh at his own jokes (there are some very good jokes) in that nasal, slightly singsong voice. His scope is impressive. One minute he's explaining why Tacitus got it wrong about the efficacy of torturing slaves, the next he's describing Tony Curtis's eyelashes or Tolstoy's influence on American novelists. "The forests and the closely wooded creeks of Hemingway's early stories ring with Tolstoy's rifle shots and the snort of his horses. Hemingway took on board every technique that Tolstoy ever devised but in all of Hemingway there is nothing like the relationship of Anna Karenina and Vronsky. For Fitzgerald, however, Anna and Vronsky were well within range."

Quest Under Capricorn, written and read by David Attenborough (3hrs abridged, BBC, £14.99)

The third in Attenborough's series The Early Years, in which he reminisces about his burgeoning career in television. We're so used to seeing him crawling about on the small screen under dripping rainforest foliage in search of rare wildlife that we forget what a fine writer he is. This entertaining account of the expedition he made in 1963 to Australia's Northern Territory underlines how the world of travel has changed. Forty-five years ago Darwin, capital of this vast 500,000-square mile region, with a population of 36,000 (16,000 Aborigines, 20,000 whites), was hicksville. Imagine the mayor of, say, Maidenhead being responsible from his town hall for an area that extends to Berlin in one direction and Tangier in another. Now it's full of tourists and hotels, but when Attenborough and his two-man film crew first went there, only a handful of foreigners had seen the famous Aboriginal rock paintings or the immense herds of water buffalo, now banished. Memo to self: listen to the first two books soonest.

A History of Modern Britain, written and read by Andrew Marr (6hrs abridged, Macmillan, £16.99)

Not strictly what it says on the tin - A Political History of Modern Britain would have been more accurate, and why not? Marr was the BBC's political editor for yonks. I'm not knocking him; I love his wit (Michael Foot was "a political poet in an age of prose"), his anecdotes (Princess Elizabeth's new fiancé, Philip Mountbatten, wryly submitting to royal etiquette and curtseying to King George, who was wearing a kilt) and his old hack's shop talk (Eric Heffer's otherwise unmemorable speech to the House which began: "I, like Jesus Christ, was born the son of a carpenter ..."). Why wasn't I taught politics like this?

Not Quite World's End, written and read by John Simpson (4hrs abridged, Macmillan, £15.99)

The man who liberated Kabul is back with yet more "did I ever tell you about the time I ... ?" stories. Interesting enough, if only he didn't sound so damned complacent.